Tuesday, October 13, 2015

It's been taking me forever to post all the things we did for our 2nd year Harry Potter themed party. I think I'll wrap it up with this post about the food.

Since our 2nd year party was first and foremost a birthday party, we served a cake for dessert, of course. This year's cake was inspired by Aunt Petunia's Pudding. We used a packaged cake mix for a two layer chocolate cake. Since the pudding looked like it would end up being a lot of frosting, which we're not too fond of, we experimented with ways to make it lighter. So, I added whipped cream to the frosting. I may have gotten carried away and used too much whipped cream. It began to get soft really fast, but there were no complaints about the taste. :)

We served students the feast dinner of Turkey and all the trimming, including Pumpkin Pasties.

We used the same recipe for pumpkin pasties from last year. But, we opted for leftover green frosting stems instead of green gumdrops pictured below. Though, the spearmint ones weren't too bad.

As I have mentioned in last years party planning, the pasty is made with packaged biscuit dough. We pulled the biscuit layers apart in the middle. Set one half in our mini bundt cake pan for the shape and filled them with pumpkin pie filling that was strained for the juice. We placed the top half on and punched the sides a little to seal. Once bakes and cooled, we added the frosting stems. I didn't have a tip large enough for the stem, but found that a sport bottle top pulled off and cut worked quite well. (This is our whipped cream frosting, so that is why it looks rather runny.)

After dinner and games it was late, so we dismissed the students. We held a showing of the Chamber of Secrets movie in our makeshift home theatre with popcorn, last years pumpkin juice recipe and butter beer. This year we acquired a projector and surround sound speakers from family members, so we had a really neat setup in our DADA classroom (aka: living room).

The next morning the plan was breakfast and start classes at 9am. There was a surprise waiting for our Slytherins (that I failed to get a pic of before they were gone.) It was in the form of two floating cupcakes suspended in front of their door when the came out of their common room. They were suspicious but ate them anyway. ("How thick can you get?!") They were yellow cupcakes with chocolate frosting and sprinkles just like Hermione made in the movie. We used large flat buttons tied to fishing line that was poked up through the cupcake to suspend. We used an "S" hooks to hang them from the door frame.

We had a busy schedule this year, so were light on the classes. Besides DADA and Potions, which I've already mentioned, we also had Herbology - Re-potting Mandrakes.

We wanted to make mandrakes that were edible. We decided on some graham cracker bears and artificial leaf stems glued in the center with homemade cookie icing (this stuff is super easy to make and holds extremely well when set). I cut apart and washed the artificial stems. (I think it might have been nice to use mint or other edible greens.) We potted them in mini ice cream cone pots. Then, students would repot them into larger cones with some crumbled chocolate cake and then some Oreo cookie crumbs mixed with graham cracker crumbs to resemble dirt. While no one was looking, we thought about replacing the repotted cookie bears with larger mandrake cookies. These could be part of another game where students would have to revive their classmates with mandrake restorative drafts when they lost our Basilisk game in the evening.

Charms - We came up with charmed pancakes for breakfast. If you've seen the Youtube video where the guy draws with pancake batter, then you get the idea. Basically we'd let each student charm the batter into a recognizable image in our magical, or electric, skillet This is actually really simple and fun. Just need a squirt bottle, like those used for ketchup or other condiments. The daughter and I made a Hogwart's crest and some other simpler things like bats and faces.

We had some other ideas for classes that didn't end up happening.

Potions - We want to up the difficulty of the potions class by changing the ingredient game from last year by making students identify the ingredients in a mixture instead of individual ingredients. For example: Kool-aid, Sugar and Water could be one potion.

Transfiguration - We thought about making a puzzle game using shapes. Students would transfigure a rat into a water goblet or teacup by reordering the pieces.

If you've noticed, we've been busy working on pixies, house elves and gnomes and the tutorial for each of them. I think we've got the pixies and gnomes perfected, and there are some pixies listed in my Etsy store with gnomes to follow. But, there are still some changes we'd like to make the the house elves. Hope to have them available soon.